Travelport unveils new hotel booking engine

30 June 2011

Travelport, the business services provider to the global travel industry, has today outlined details of the new, ground breaking Travelport Rooms and More™ hotel booking engine. Over the coming months, the new offering, which is designed to be a one-stop hotel shop for travel agents, will be made available to all agencies worldwide, even those who do not use the Travelport GDS platform.

The development of Travelport Rooms and More, a key part of Travelport’s ongoing drive to enhance its hospitality offering, allows travel agents to book a greater choice of commissionable accommodation and take advantage of the rapidly growing hotel sector. Recent Euromonitor estimates predict that the value of global hotel bookings will reach $545bn in 2015, demonstrating a compound annual growth rate of 5.9 per cent between 2010 and 2015.

Ready for a phased worldwide roll out from July, Travelport Rooms and More combines the consumer insights, metasearch functionality and user interface developed by Sprice.com, which was acquired by Travelport in May 2010, with Travelport’s core B2B expertise, to deliver a completely integrated hotel booking platform. Key benefits for users include comparison shopping across multiple providers and the ability to both book and cancel hotel bookings in the same tool.

As well as Travelport’s extensive GDS hotel content (available to Travelport GDS subscribers), the Travelport hospitality team has also signed new agreements with over 20 hotel aggregators and OTAs including industry leaders such as bedsonline, Transhotel, LateRooms.com and lowcostbeds. In total, over 200,000 hotel properties will be available to book, often with multiple options available on the same property, giving the travel agent complete transparency and the opportunity to select their preferred provider. Travelport Rooms and More will also include hotel reviews and images as well as rental car content provided by TUI Cars.

Niklas Andréen, Travelport’s group vice president, global hospitality, explained that new content would continue to be added post-launch and estimated that there could be as many as 50 aggregators signed up by the end of the year. Explaining the case for developing Travelport Rooms and More, Andréen said:

ADVERTISEMENT

“Our leisure-focussed travel agency customers told us they were spending far too much time searching for content across numerous hotel booking solutions and websites and then struggling with inefficient booking processes. With Travelport Rooms and More we believe we have responded to their feedback by combining the state of art technology we gained through our acquisition of Sprice with extensive new and varied hospitality content and a new highly efficient booking engine.

The case for developing Travelport Rooms and More was a strong one - it complements our GDS hotel offering and provides leisure and mixed travel agencies with a great new hotel booking engine.”

The announcement of the new hotel booking tool follows a number of other recent announcements from Travelport related to its ongoing investment in hospitality, including news of a larger, dedicated hospitality team and new helpdesks for hotel and car supplier customers.

Travelport Rooms and More will be deployed to all regions globally by the end of the year.